Deloitte: ISP filter won't affect Australian businesses

A Deloitte analyst has predicted the Government’s controversial ISP filter will have minimal long-term effect on Australian businesses.

Speaking at the launch of the consulting firm’s Predictions 2010 reports in Sydney today, technology, media and telecommunications partner, Damien Tampling, said ISPs could potentially experience some fall in business if illegal downloads were filtered by the Government.

“I would’ve thought that the percentage of content ... pulled down through any ISP is more than double digits [per cent] of the legal content,” Tampling said. “If you’re taking 20 per cent of their revenues based on traffic from illegal content, and you’re stripping that back by half, then it’s going to have a bottom-line impact for them.”

But a growing trend of ISPs partnering with content producers would balance out any potential loss in profits, the analyst said.

“What an ISP would lose in terms of data traffic and the money from that [illegal traffic] would be made up for by the capacity of the people who are producing the content to make money from commercialising it. I see it as a bit of an ecosystem,” Tampling said.

Overall, Tampling said any proposed version of the filter was unlikely to negatively impact non-ISP Australian businesses.

“Corporate productivity might improve significantly! I don’t think it’ll have that much impact. I don’t think the intention of the filter is to stop people from using social networking sites as a corporate filter might. It’s more around pornographic and illegal content,” he said. “I don’t see how protecting that isn’t a good thing as long as it’s done understanding the inter-relationship it has with other parts of the market and the world.”

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